In January 2018, RightScale conducted its seventh annual State of the Cloud Survey of the latest cloud computing trends, with a focus on infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. Both public and private cloud adoption grew in 2018, with larger enterprises increasing their focus on public cloud. AWS is no longer the runaway leader as Azure has grown rapidly and is now a close second, especially among enterprise users. New to the survey this year is data on the large and growing spend on public cloud, which has driven cost optimization to the top of companies' 2018 priority list. To gain control of growing spend, enterprise cloud teams are taking a stronger cloud governance role, including managing costs.

Enterprises are now managing highly complex cloud pricing structures and an onslaught of new cloud services. We cover governance best practices — like tagging your cloud resources — that enable you to efficiently optimize costs across all cloud providers and ensure that you have access to any and all of the cloud services that your company requires. And we share a template with a recommended set of global tags that you can customize.

Since the announcements from AWS re:Invent in late November, we’ve updated our free Cloud Comparison tool to include a slew of new features announced by AWS as well as new features from the other top public cloud providers Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.

The Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws revealed this week can expose modern systems to risk and affect users of cloud services from public cloud providers as well as those operating their own private clouds. Here’s what you need to know to protect yourself.